Steven R. Hoag

@srhoag

Born and raised in Wisconsin, married to Angela, have two adult children (who are both out making their own lives), and we are currently living in Reedsburg, WI. I've been involved in I.T. since 1978. It was a hobby until 1985 when I started a Bulletin Board System called the Gamers Exchange. That lead me to start my own business called Digital Design & Publication (later renamed to Hoag Computer Technologies). I finally shut that down in 2003 officially. I had already sold off parts of the business by that point and was just keeping the business going to support a handful of customers. Got married in 2002 and with a family, I just did not have time as I had to get a "regular" job to provide insurance and a stable income. I've been working in the IT industry most of my time since then, although I did take about a year off due to severe burnout. During that year, I took a job working for a company that did vinyl siding and window replacement work. Shortly after they closed down for the winter, management asked me if I would come back as a contractor to develop some estimating software for them. Once again, I was back in I.T. After that, I took a job programming industrial robots at a small foundry and did that for five years. Left that job to move to another, larger, foundry that was highly automated and got to help run some very interesting systems including self-driving forklifts and several Automatic Storage And Retrieval systems (ASRS). Left there to take a contract job with the Univeristy of Wisconsin, setting up and documenting the new timekeeping system they had decided to purchase. This was installed at all their campuses and feed back to the main HR office in Madison, WI. My next stop was working for a toy company in Milwaukee, WI. I was not there long before I was helping to improve their warehouse operations by writing a custom WMS (Warehouse Management System) which included adding portable scanguns to the operation. After that had been up and running for about a year, I got put on the team to select a new ERP software (Enterprise Resource Planning) which would replace their antiquated accounting software and my WMS system with a new, all-inclusive system. We went with Microsoft Dynamics for this. Once that was up and running, I found myself as effectively the CIO of the company, as I was put in charge of the entire I.T. operation there. I left there after 11 years to take a position with ICF International to work as a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Business Analyst, where I am today. I help create systems for utility companies all over the US and Canada to manage energy savings programs that the utilities are required to operate. ICF was the company that originated the Energy Star program that most of us are familiar with today. We are very active in also helping utilities with adding green power to the grid and working with government units planning power distribution for electric car chargers and other innovations. ICF has been the absolute best company I have ever worked for. Outside all that fun, I have been a fan of science fiction all of my life. I grew up watching the Original Star Trek series, Space 1999, UFO, and many of the other Gerry Anderson productions. Of course, Dr. Who has always been on my need to watch list. I was fortunate enough to be on some of the early chat-type programs during my Bulletin Board System days and I got to exchange messages with J. Michael Stracynski who was working on a little TV project known as Babylon 5. That was so amazing and I really enjoyed watching the show as I remember talking about so many of the concepts in those chats. Playing the TTRPG Traveller since about 1978, I was involved in creating really fun Sci-fi based story lines. I was fortunately enough to get to meet and talk with Marc Miller who originated that game and he is still heavily involved in it yet today. My love of Traveller, BattleTech, and several smaller RPGs of that genre led me to my love of world building. Now that my life has slowed down some, I am now taking my world building and I have decided to try actually writing novels. On top of all that, my wife and I started an on-line reselling business called Angie's Oddities LLC. We go to rummage sales, estate sales, thrift stores, and anywhere else we can find undervalued items that we can then sell for a profit. We have two stores on eBay, one on Mercari, we sell on Facebook Marketplace, and just have a lot of fun doing it. Not only that, but we always enjoyed hunting for deals to save ourselves money, and now we actually make money doing it. With all that we do, we find ourselves debt free (except for the new house we bought last year), we have built up a nice nest egg in savings, put a lot more into retirement funds, and been able to start enjoying a little philanthropy along the way.